20010831

I just noticed that there was a whole slew of words that i missed in the lexicon from part two of the project (04.20.00.12.07.13.25). The following corrections have been made:

cwὲstrióþ

thank you

rac blynþ

to be named, to be called

blynþ

to call

rac

passive particle

aþ

silence

ráta

child

bórga

big

pέlci

small

rátacàþ

son/daughter

blocþ

battle

clớgεx

to slay, to kill

vεlc

old

gú§e

story, tale

hanác

man (i’ll consider in a moment how to reconcile this with lað)

tεmtið

early, long-ago

glácsi

remember

Well, first things first. I’ve added the particle rac to the list, which basically makes a verb into a passive adjective. (Could one say that this is a particle which passifies verbs?) I had previously used this as a suffix, but i would rather come up with a particle to keep words simple.

As far as the hanác/lað situation, henceforth hanác will be the noun and lað the pronoun.

Okay, moving on. A few new words i came up with.

patáx

to be able, can, could

ðrέpnid

to be allowed, may

na§

must, to be necessary

mέlεx

to be likely, probably

ðráupnir

to become

cwέgir

to believe

mwil

bread

-ála

between

Also, whilst i was exiled to the kitchen table for yet another round of computer D&D, i came up with numbers. Well, the basic ones anyway.

1

am

10

(am) sεþ

2

dai

11

(am) sεþ am

3

tran

12

(am) sεþ dai

4

jamp

20

dai acsέþ

5

frεm

30

tran acsέþ

6

§e

100

(am) sam

7

dan

200

dai acsám

8

rεlc

300

tran acsám

9

nen

1000

§εp

I haven’t come up with any beyond 1000 yet, but my intention is to change the standard format a little bit by having each approaching decimal proceed to one place before the next, instead of in threes as do in most languages. Perhaps that’s badly phrased, but i’m not quite sure of the proper terms when talking about numbers. That is to say, most languages go up through ten and a hundred and start over... hence ten, hundred, thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand, million, ten million, hundred million, billion, ten billion, hundred billion, trillion... and so on. Malt§έgj will be unique in that each new number will proceed to the number before it, so... ten, hundred, ten hundred, thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand, ten hundred thousand, million, ten million, hundred million, ten hundred million, thousand million, ten thousand million, hundred thousand million, ten hundred thousand million... A bit like binary, really, only with ten digits. Hence there’s a lovely little conservation of numbers which mathematicians and scientists are bound to love for discussing such eternally relevant subjects such as the mass of the sun in grams or the distance between earth and the most recently discovered quasar in millimetres or perhaps the number of electrons in your average can of Mountain Dew. I’ve drawn up a little chart, because some conversion is needed, but please forgive any errors in my standard nomenclature, because to be honest, after vigintillion i started making it up. I’ve also heard nonillion, nontillion, and novillion for 1030. I’ve added some pointers to show just how astronomically big these numbers actually are.

[still preparing chart... please try again later]

I didn’t actually notice this until i was in the process of creating the above table, but it’s more like binary than i thought. Notice that each new number falls on a binary power of ten (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128...). From this, we can assume that “sextillion,” if we should ever need a number quite that large, would be 1 x 10256. Or, in very tiny numbers:

Septillion, it then follows, is 1 x 10512. I’m not going to write that out, however.

Well, that was fun, however useless it may have been. I just have this strange obsession to conserve numbers, like i’m going to run out of them one day if i don’t. It’s not so bad, though, since they gave me those nice purple pills to take with the green ones.